Peter the Great

by Robert K. Massie

  At Peter's insistence, the museum was open to the public and guides were provided to explain the exhibits. When Yaguzhinsky suggested that a rouble be charged for admission to defray expenses, Peter objected that this would keep people away. Instead, he said that the museum should not only be free, but that people should be tempted to come by offering in the Tsar's name a dish of coffee or a glass of wine as refreshment. These expenses were paid from Peter's pocket.

  To the collections purchased abroad were added curios such as elephants' teeth found near Voronezh which Peter speculated were relics of the passage of Alexander the Great, and antiquities found among the ruins of a pagan temple near the Caspian Sea—images, vessels and several parchments in an unknown language. Similarly, while digging for gold near Samarkand, prospectors had found a number of ancient brass figures, which were sent to Prince Gagarin, the Governor of Siberia, and by him to the Tsar. They included brass idols, minotaurs, oxen, geese, deformed old men and young women. The mouths of the idols were hinged so that they could move; Peter, ever wary of religious superstitions, speculated that "it is likely the priests made use of this to impose on the people by speaking through them."

  Peter also attempted to broaden the knowledge of his subjects through the use of books and libraries. The Tsar himself had collected books all his life, and especially on his visits to Germany, France, Holland and other countries in the West. His personal library included works on a wide range of subjects, including military and naval affairs, science, history, medicine, law and religion. Peter's books were first kept in the Summer Palace; then, as their number grew, they were moved to the Winter Palace, Peterhof and other sites. After his death, his library became the nucleus of the library of the Russian Academy of Science. In 1722, Peter sent orders to the principal ancient monasteries of Russia to make a search for old manuscripts, chronicles and books, and to send those that were found to Moscow, whence they were forwarded to Peter's private study in St. Petersburg. Upon the Emperor's death, most of these invaluable documents also were transferred to the library of the Academy of Science.

  Peter had admired the zoo in Paris and on his return from France immediately established a menagerie in St. Petersburg. Apes and monkeys, lions and leopards and even an elephant from India were installed, but all had difficulty surviving the frigid months of winter. Although Peter had a special house built for the elephant, with fires burning night and day to warm the beast, it lived only a few years. A different kind of exhibition was that displayed by the colony of Samoyeds, a tribe of savage Laplanders from the Arctic coast, who came every winter, bringing their reindeer and dogs, to camp on the ice in the Neva. There, inside an enclosure, they lived in a model of one of their native villages, accepting the alms-giving of a curious crowd. The Russians did not go too close, however, as the Samoyeds were reputed to "bite strangers on the face and ears."

  The new collections and the buildings that housed them were products of Peter's insatiable curiosity and his desire to teach his subjects what he had learned. Every journey in Russia and, even more so, every journey abroad resulted in the acquisition of more oddities, instruments, books, models, paintings and animals. On arriving in even a small town when traveling, Peter always asked to see whatever was remarkable or different in that place. When told that there was nothing unusual, he replied, "Who knows? If it not be so for you, perhaps it will be for me. Let me see everything."

  One of the most extraordinary of these acquisitions was the Great Globe of Gottorp. While traveling in Schleswig in the duchy of Gottorp in 1713, Peter had discovered this remarkable scientific and mechanical device. It was a huge, hollow globe, eleven and a half feet in diameter, made in 1664 for the ruling Duke of Holstein. The external surface was a globular map of the earth, while on the inside was a chart of the heavens. Viewers could climb inside by ascending several steps, then sit at a round table circled by benches for ten or twelve people. A winch could be turned which would make the heavens revolve around the audience. Naturally, Peter was intrigued and delighted by the globe, and when the administrator for the young Duke Charles Frederick offered it as a gift in the name of the state, Peter accepted with joy, declaring that the people of Holstein could not have made a more acceptable present. Menshikov, commanding the Russian army in Germany, was ordered to take personal charge of packaging and shipping the globe. Special permission was obtained from the Swedes for its unhindered passage by ship up the Baltic to Reval. In the winter of 1715, the enormous sphere was transported by sledges and rollers over the snows to St. Petersburg. Because the globe was so large and Peter would not risk it being dismantled, in many places the road had to be widened, branches lopped off or even whole trees felled so that the globe could pass. When it arrived, Peter placed it in the house he had built for the now deceased elephant, and he went to look at it for several hours every day.

  Peter's most important and lasting contribution to intellectual activity in Russia was his foundation of the Academy of Science.* The project had been suggested by Leibniz, who had already founded the Prussian Academy of Science in Berlin, but who died in 1716 before Peter was ready to act. The Tsar's interest was further stimulated by his own election to the French Academy after his visit to Paris. His letter accepting this honor shines with almost childish delight: "We are very delighted that you have honored Us in this way, and we would like to assure you that we shall accept the position you have given Us with great pleasure, and that it is our fervent wish to apply Ourself assiduously in order to contribute as much as possible to science and therefore to demonstrate that we are a worthy member of your association." As an initial contribution, the new member forwarded a new map of the Caspian Sea. He signed his letter "Affectionately yours, Peter I."

  On January 28, 1724, a year before his death, the Tsar issued the decree founding the Russian Academy. Typically, it also contained an explanation

  so that Russians would understand what it was that was being founded:

  Usually two kinds of institutions are used in organizing arts and sciences. One is known as a University, the other as an Academy of arts and sciences. A University is an association of learned individuals who teach young people. ... An Academy, on the other hand, is an association of learned and skilled people who do research and inventions.

  In this case, however—so the decree continued—because learned men were rare in Russia, Academicians would teach as well as do research. An annual grant of 25,000 roubles, drawn from the customs tolls at the Baltic ports, was assigned to support the institution.

  Peter died before the Academy began to function, but in

  *Which, after two hundred fifty years, remains the nation's preeminent intellectual institution.

  December 1725, its doors first opened. Seventeen Academicians had been lured from France, Germany, and Switzerland, including philosophers, mathematicians, historians, an astronomer, and doctors of anatomy, law, and chemistry, many of them scholars of first rank. Unfortunately, there were no Russian students qualified for university classes so that eight German students also had to be imported. Even so, audiences for lectures were smaller than the number required by charter so that Academicians occasionally had to atend each others' lectures.

  The irony of a learned academy functioning in a country that lacked any significant number of elementary or secondary schools was not lost on contemporaries, but Peter, looking into the future, thrust all objections aside. Using a metaphor, he explained:

  I have to harvest big stooks [shocks of grain], but I have no mill; and there is not enough water close by to build a water mill; but there is water enough at a distance; only I shall have no time to make a canal for the length of my life is uncertain. And therefore I am building the mill first and have only given orders for the canal to be begun, which will the better force my successors to bring water to the completed mill.

  62

  ALONG THE CASPIAN

  With the signing of the Treaty of Nystad, Russia was finally at peace. Now, it seem
ed, the colossal energies which had been poured into military campaigns from Azov to Copenhagen could at last be turned toward Russia itself. Peter did not wish to be remembered in history as a conqueror or a warrior; he saw his place as a reformer. Yet, the celebrations in St. Petersburg hailing the Peace of Nystad were still in progress when Peter ordered his army to prepare for a new campaign. The following spring, the army would march into the Caucasus against Persia. And, once again, the army would be personally led by the Emperor.

  Although its announcement came as a surprise, this march to the south was no sudden whim. For most of his life, Peter had heard stories of the East, the empire of Cathay, the wealth of the Great Mogul of India, the richness of the trade which passed over caravan routes through Siberia to China, and from India through Persia to the West. These tales had come from travelers passing through Russia who stopped long enough in the German Suburb to stir the imagination of the youthful Tsar. They came from Nicholas Witsen, Burgomaster of Amsterdam and expert on the geography of the East, who spent many hours in conversation with Peter during the Tsar's first winter in Holland. Now, at last, Peter meant to carry out these youthful dreams.

  He had already attempted to reach out toward China by extending the existing trade in tea, furs and silk and by establishing a permanent Russian mission in Peking. But the Chinese were proud and suspicious. The militant Manchu Dynasty was at the peak of its power in Peking. The great Emperor K'ang-hsi, wwho had come to the throne at the age of seven in 1661 and ruled until his death in 1722, had made peace with all his neighbors and embarked on a reign distinguished for its patronage of painting, poetry, procelain and learning; dictionaries and encyclopedias published with his encouragement remained standard for generations. K'ang-hsi tolerated foreigners at his court, but Peter's efforts to improve relations with China made slow progress. In 1715, a Russian priest, the Archimandrite Hilarion, was received at Peking and given the rank of Mandarin, Fifth Class. Finally, in 1719, Peter appointed Captain Lev Ismailov of the Preobrazhensky Guards as his envoy extraordinary to Peking and sent with him as a present for the emperor four ivory telescopes which Peter had made himself. Ismailov was received on a friendly and dignified footing at the Chinese court, but he outreached himself. He asked that all restrictions on trade between Russia and China be lifted, that permission be given for construction of a Russian church in Peking, and that Russian consulates be established in important towns in China to facilitate trade. To this, the Chinese replied loftily, "Our Emperor does not trade and has no bazaars. You value your merchants very highly. We scorn commerce. Only poor people and servants occupy themselves in that way with us, and there is no profit at all to us from your trade. We have enough of Russian goods even if your people did not bring them." Ismailov departed, and thereafter Russian caravans were hindered more severely. K'ang-hsi died in 1722, and his son Yung Cheng was even more hostile to Christians in general; thus, the avenue to trade with China was narrowed rather than broadened in Peter's final years.

  Far to the north, along the desolate shores of the Sea of Okhotsk and the northern Pacific, there was no one to bar the Russian advance. It was under Peter that the huge Kamchatka Peninsula and the Kurile Islands were claimed by Russia. In 1724, shortly before he died, Peter summoned a Danish-born captain in his fleet, Vitus Bering, and assigned him the task of leading an expedition to the periphery of the Eurasian continent a thousand miles beyond Kamchatka, to determine whether Eurasia and North America were joined by land. Bering found the strait, fifty-three miles wide and only 144 feet deep, which subsequently was named after him.*

  A year before Bering set out, Peter had dispatched two frigates to the opposite end of the earth, to carry his fraternal greetings "to the illustrious King and Owner of the glorious island of Madagascar." The inhabitants of that gigantic island had a poor record of hospitality to Western visitors: French traders and colonists were massacred in 1674, and through most of the eighteenth century the only Westerners who set foot on the island were pirates such as Captain Kidd. Peter's motive in sending this expedition was not really to establish a foothold in Madagascar. His ships were ordered to stop there and conclude a treaty if possible, then to sail on to their real destination, India. Peter dreamed of a trade agreement with the Great Mogul and also wanted some teakwood on which he could exercise his talent for carpentry. As it happened, the ships reached neither India nor Madagascar; they never left the Baltic. One of the frigates sprang a leak a few days after sailing, and both ships returned to Reval. Peter was disappointed, but he died before the project could be renewed.

  It was not the sea route to India, in any case, but the land routes through Persia and Central Asia which attracted him. The Central Asian caravans came over the Khyber Pass from India, passed through Kabul, crossed the jagged peaks of the Hindu Kush and traversed a thousand miles of desert inhabitd by Kazak's and Kalmucks before reaching Astrachan and the lower Volga. In Peter's time, there was more turbulence than usual among these desert people. Two rival Moslem khans, the rulers of Khiva and Bokhara, were struggling for predominance, and each sometimes turned to the Russians for assistance.** Peter, because of his war

  *In the years that followed, Russian explorers and settlers crossed the strait, and a string of Russian forts and trading posts sprang up along the Alaska coast. Eventually these Russian settlements reached as far south as San Francisco, where, in 1806, a little over eighty years after Peter's death, a Russian fur-trading center was established. For more than a century, Alaska— known then as Russian America—was controlled by the state-owned Russian-American Company. In 1867, the vast area which became America's forty-ninth state was sold by Tsar Alexander II for $7,000,000. Today, the only point on the globe where the frontiers of the United States and the Soviet Union actually meet is across the fifty-three miles of the Bering Strait.

  **Weber describes an unusual kind of help which the Khan of Bokhara asked of Peter. The Khan's ambassador in Petersburg, says Weber, "begged of the Tsar a number of Swedish girls to go along with him, or to give him leave to buy some, his master having heard that the Swedes were a very warlike nation, which made him desirous to have some of their race in his dominions." This request met with a repulse; however, he found means to get two Swedish girls, whom he carried along with him.

  with Sweden, had been unable to respond to these appeals, but his interest in the desert land had been aroused.

  Peter's interest in all the regions to the east and south had also been stimulated by reports of gold. There were pebbles of gold in the rivers of Siberia, veins of gold along the shores of the Caspian, golden sands in the deserts of Central Asia—such stories circulated freely in St. Petersburg. In 1714, 1716 and 1719, Peter sent expeditions into Siberia and Central Asia in search of the precious metal. They ended without gain, although the first expedidon, during its withdrawal, constructed a fort at the juncture of the Irtysh and Om rivers which grew into the town of Omsk.

  The 1716 expedidon ended in spectacular tragedy. Hearing stories of gold along the Amu Darya River, which ran through the lands of the Khan of Khiva, Peter resolved to send congratulations to the new Khan on his accession to the throne and an offer of Russian protection if he would accept the Tsar's suzerainty. Along the way, the expedition was also to build a fort at the mouth of the Amu Darya, reconnoiter the length of the river and send merchants and engineers to the head of the river, across the mountains and down into India. Once their reports were in hand and the Khans of Bokhara and Khiva had given allegiance, Peter could begin the development of the permanent trade route which was his ultimate objective.

  Unfortunately, Peter chose the wrong man to lead this expedition. Prince Alexander Bekovich Cherkassky had been bom a Circassian Moslem prince named Devlet Kisden Mirza. His father's lands in the Caucasus lay within the empire of the Shah of Persia. One day, the Shah happened to see the beautiful wife of Cherkassky's father and ordered his vassal to send to him this exquisite piece of property. The father refused, and fled with hi
s family to Moscow for protection. There, his son converted to Christianity, became a captain of the Guard and served as an officer in Astrachan and along the Caucasus frontier. Peter, thinking Cherkassky's background ideally suited him for dealing with the Moslem khans, summoned him to Riga for final instructions and sent him on his way.

  In the summer of 1716, Cherkassky left Astrachan with 4,000 regular soldiers and detachments of Cossacks, engineers and surveyors. He built two forts on the eastern side of the Caspian Sea, long considered the territory of the Khan of Khiva. In the spring of 1717, despite reports of the Khan's anger at this action, he began his march toward Khiva, 300 miles across empty, waterless desert. One hundred miles from Khiva, the Khan's army appeared and a three-day battle ensued. Cherkassky was victorious, and the Khan asked for peace, which he and his elders swore on the Koran to uphold. Then, he invited his conqueror to enter Khiva, suggesting that, for greater convenience and ease of provisioning, the Russian force divide itself into five detachments, each to be stationed in a separate town. Cherkassky foolishly agreed, and shortly thereafter the Khan's army marched from one town to another, compelling the surrender of the Russian detachments one by one. Every officer was slaughtered and every soldier sold into slavery. Cherkassky himself was carried into the Khan's tent, where a piece of red cloth, the sign of blood and death, was spread on the ground. Cherkassky refused to kneel on the cloth before the Khan, whereupon the Khan's guards slashed the calves of his legs with their scimitars, pitching him involuntarily on the ground before their master. Afterward, the unfortunate Circassian-Russian was beheaded, his skin was stuffed, and, thus transformed, he was exhibited in a courtyard of the Khan's palace.

  Frustrated in his hope of reaching India through Central Asia, Peter pressed ahead with his efforts to open the land route through Persia. He was also anxious to persuade the Shah to divert the lucrative silk trade so that it should pass from Persia north into the Caucasus to Astrachan and thence along the Russian rivers to St. Petersburg, rather than following its traditional route west from Persia through Turkey to the Mediterranean. Peter did not think that this would be difficult; his relations with the incumbent Shah had always been amicable. This monarch was, according to Weber, writing in 1715, "a prince of forty years of age, of a very indolent temper, giving himself wholly up to pleasures, adjusting his difference with the Turks, Indians and other neighbors by the interposition of his governors and by dint of money; that though he called himself the Shah-in-Shah, or Emperor of Emperors, yet he dreaded the Turk . . . and notwithstanding the Turks have in the space of eighty years conquered from the Persians many kingdoms, Viz, Media, Assyria, Babylon and Arabia, yet they [the Persians] always avoided making war against the Porte."